SAXIFRAGA. 



many another seedling in the same lot — Guildford Seedling (crimson), 

 Stormonth's Seedling (smaller and earlier). Fergusoni, Craven Gem, &c. ; 

 these have all sprung from the same crosses in various forms, making 

 up so vast a series, both natural and artificial, that the wise gardener, 

 recognising their utter invalidity as species, and the uselessness of 

 multiplying their names, will yet gladly acquire everyone of them by 

 catalogue-descriptions, to adorn the lower and outlying parts of the 

 rock with wide mats of their beautiful, neat, and hardy folia go that 

 changes neither by summer nor winter, except when it is half hidden 

 in early summer by the forest of stems that are to carry the glowing 

 or blushing little plattors of stout blossom. Any fragment of these 

 will grow, if stuck into the earth at any moment ; but seed should 

 always be collected and sown broadcast, where the strains in culti- 

 vation are brilliant, on the chance of a development more brilliant 

 still, that shall outshine the reddest seedling of them all, and make 

 the most fiery Admiral go pale. Of the more justly-named forms of 

 the wild S. decipiens, we may mention S. hirta, very free and coarse 

 and largo and hairy, with very large flowers on long stout shoots ; 

 S. incurvifolia, with the leaves of the rosettes incurving so as to turn 

 them almost into balls ; and S. Sternbergi, a handsome solid massed 

 plant, sending up innumerable straight stems of notable cream-white 

 flowers. It may be seen in myriads among the limestone rocks of 

 County Clare, looking out across the Atlantic from among carpets of 

 Dryas, threaded with azure knops of Gentiana verna. 



S. Delavayi is a new species from China, of the great-leaved pink- 

 headed Bergenia group. 



S. depressa stands close to S. androsacea, but has rather large 

 wedge-shaped leaves, densely glandular on both sides, and cut into three 

 blunt lobes at the tip. These leaves tightly hug the ground, and the 

 little rosette sends up a stiff glandular stem of 2 or 3 inches bearing a 

 few chalk-white flowers. It is, like the other, a high-alpine of tin- 

 sodden snow-borders, not easy to grow, and of no great attractiveness. 



S. Desoidavyi, originally sent out as S. carinata, is a mix-up that 

 stands chiefly for a small Kabschia, with quite distinct, quito loose 

 masses of minute dark-green rosettes, and loosely set with erect- 

 pointing needle-narrow stiff little spiked leaves. The stems arc mere 

 dwarfs, set with foliage, green, an inch or two high, each carrying one 

 narrow-petalled yellow cup that does not open widely, and has wavy 

 a to the petals. The real S. Desoulavyi is not in cultivation. 

 Caucasian botanists are now responsible for some eight or ten named 

 yellow Kabschias differing only in the most microscopic and uncertain 

 points. 



